Yay! It’s time for National Poetry Month when the Poetry Lovers unite across the blogosphere to share their love of poetry. Last year I wrote a poem a day about the father I had never known. It was an incredible emotional journey for me. I struggled to find a theme for this year, especially since my writing has not been going well. In fact the writing was going so “not well” that I decided to take the month of March off from all writing and try to do something I don’t know how to do very well – play.

For most of the month of March I have been learning the basics of painting backgrounds for my collages. Everything was foreign to me – the kinds of paint, the kinds of paper, the kinds of brushes, even how to hold the brush was a new adventure. I’ve learned some things about art which led me to learning some things about writing which led me to learning some things about myself.

For National Poetry Month I’m going to look back at my month of play and try to distill some of what I’ve learned into poems. I’m not promising final, finished and polished drafts. Just another emotional honest journey through my life.

Guilty fingers poke and prod,
pushing me toward something
that I don’t know
if I really know
how to do anymore.

The lack of words steals my voice,
the soul of what once defined me.

No longer a beginner
I cannot rely on hope
to bring me to the page.

I close my eyes

I am undone.

I am silent.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

To see all the poetic events going on this month, check out this link at Kidlitosphere Central.
Amy, at The Poem Farm, has the Poetry Friday round-up.

For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

I’m so used to feeling guilty about something (everything?) that I wasn’t quite sure how to approach a month of play. Since I have fallen in love with collage and art journaling I decided to devote March to art. I had signed up for a couple of online classes over a year ago and finally got around to trying the first lessons. I watched video after video on YouTube. I read art blogs. I was ready to dive in. Except.

Except that I soon discovered artists have to deal with some of the very same things writers have to deal with – such as the blank page.

I had a stash of blank books (much to beautiful to write in or use for art but I had them, that was the main thing, right?) and I pulled one out and stared at the blank pages. I was just as blocked on the art side as I was on the writing side. Back to reading blogs and watching videos and going back through my notes from class. One message came through – if you don’t know what to do, slap some paint on the page. You can come back and do something pretty with it later. So I resolved that every time Cassie rang the bells to go outside (my art desk is across from her patio door) I would sit down and slap some paint, any color I grabbed, onto the page. I’d worry about what I’d do to the pages later. The 10 minutes Cassie spent outside was just enough to get the paint down and then let her back in the door.

I remember my painting teacher telling me that she had painted 40 backgrounds in her art journal before she painted one she actually liked. Just like with writing (or anything) the more we do it, the better we get at it but it had been so long since I had been a beginner at anything. I hadn’t even begun to think about second and third layers of paint. I couldn’t believe how hard it was for me to do something so simple, just cover a page in a single color. 

The brush feels awkward in my fingers,
like one of those too fat pencils
we had to use in kindergarten,
and I wish I could call back that child
I used to be to hold my hand.

With spastic jerks, I push paint across the page.
I cannot count the times I drop the brush, landing
blobs of paint on the desk, my jeans, my shirt
and more than once, my chin.

The teacher makes it look so easy,
the way her brush waltzes across the page,
she spins paint into corners, pulls it back to the center,
long strokes, short strokes and then, in no time she is done,
and damn it all, she is still smiling.

Purple. Red. Yellow. Pink. Just paint
Two pages, five, eleven.
Blue. Green. Turquoise. (Hey, I mixed that.)
Don’t think. Don’t count. Just paint.

Over one hundred pages later
I hold my most favorite brush,
gently move paint across the page
and realize, I have finally learned to dance.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

This is one of the four art journals I prepped during the month of March. All those juicy pages waiting for me add to them.

Kidlitosphere Central has the master list of all the poetic events going on this month.

For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

I spent a lot of my play time thinking and a lot of my thinking time wondering, where did the silence I was feeling come from? Even after a month of pondering, I’m still not sure I know. I cannot remember a time when words hadn’t been there to save me when I wasn’t strong enough to save myself so this silence, this utter inability to put words to the page frightened me, as though a part of me had died, but was still trapped inside. I’ve always been a rule follower. I like to know the expectations the world has for me so I can meet and exceed them. But I never thought about the expectations I should have (if any) for myself.

Women, mothers, daughters – so many of us are conditioned to take care of the rest of the world before we take care of ourselves. A month of play seemed totally selfish, decadent, frivolous and at times, just plain crazy. Much of the first week I wandered around the house not doing anything except to pause every so often to slap some paint on the page or watch an art video. I picked things up and put them down again. I didn’t know how to be still, how to be in the moment, how to let my mind and body tell me what it needed me to hear.

I have always had an overwhelming need for silence. It’s the introvert in me. But this was more than usual. I craved intense and immense silence. I watched the art videos with the sound off. I couldn’t listen to music. And when I painted in those ten minute blocks I was thinking about nothing but paint on the paper. Blue on white. Yellow on blue. Scrape. Scratch. Twirl. The brush on the paper was the only sound I heard.

I soon learned that to paint you have to be in the moment. Paint dries too fast for you to do anything else. I don’t know how many books I’ve read on how to quiet your mind or how to learn to be more Zen but none of those lessons ever had the effect on me that paint on paper did. Paint. Here. Now.

How dare I
spend my day mixing multitudes of blues
wondering
which becomes the ocean’s murky depths
and which reflects the simple summer sky?
How dare I not?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Kidlitosphere Central has the master list of all the poetic events going on this month.

For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

I’ve always been one of those writers who said they "heard voices" and didn’t see pictures. I could tell you how my characters felt but not what they looked like. Even my dreams were primarily auditory and not visual.

During my month of play I gave myself the same sleep intention every night, "What stories should I tell?" I didn’t even mention a character’s name because I didn’t want to influence my subconscious. For a few weeks I had no response. None in my dreams and none in one of those moments of inspiration that come when you least except it. I just kept on doing what I was already doing. I couldn’t say that I trusted the process, I just hadn’t invested anything emotionally in a particular outcome.

After a few weeks of practicing mixing colors and playing with various texture techniques, I was surprised to find myself thinking in pictures and not words. Now considering my fears around not writing and wondering if I would ever write again, this might have made me even more afraid that my silence was permanent and not just a passing pause. But instead I found it invigorating. Laying in bed, waiting to fall asleep and I would wonder what would happen if added a glaze of burnt sienna or dripped some India ink across the half-finished collage that waited on my desk. I saw myself grabbing a handful of colorful papers and gluing them willy-nilly and watching a sunset explode in front of me.

Making art was changing the way my brain worked.

A pair of haiku for today.

Scheherazade
paints tales only I can hear
when I close my eyes

silence sits with me
I am unafraid. Art sings,
colors hold my hand

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Kidlitosphere Central has the master list of all the poetic events going on this month.

For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

Painting kept me in the here and now. In ten and fifteen minute increments I could focus on colors and textures and forget about writing. Except I could never really forget. Not completely.

Two more haiku

untold stories wait
while silence overwhelms me.
at my desk, I weep

I am a writer
who does not write, undefined,
who am i now?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

I know many people say, and they are right to do so, that the joy is in the process of writing, not in the sale. But truth be told, once you’ve made a sale or two or three, it’s hard to focus on process instead of product. At least for me.

Before I’d ever heard of query letters or a synopsis
or even dared imagine the possibility
of signing with a New York agent,
I used to sit on the stoop of cement in my garage
and write exactly the kind of stories
I liked to read.

I didn’t have a market guide
or a critique group
and SCBWI was just a bunch of
mixed up letters from the alphabet.

Before I ever sold a single book
I didn’t wonder how many copies it would sell
or when I would earn back my advance
or whether the reviewers would be kind
if they decided to review it at all.

The Internet was still a dream
to be unfurled
so there were no worries about
blogs or websites or social media status updates.

I wrote because it made me happy
to imagine the child I used to be
in the stories I told myself.
I wrote because figuring out what happened next
was more fun than a crossword puzzle
or learning how to knit.
and I wrote because when I didn’t write,
I was (according to my kids) grumpy
until I once again picked up a pad and pen.

I don’t want to go back in time
or undo what I’ve done over the years
but I want to find a way to remember what it felt like
to sit on that cement stoop scribbling on that green steno pad
plotting stories for no one but myself.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Is it a poem because it rhymes
(Seussian or otherwise)
or perhaps because the lines fall to expected feet,
scanned to please the ear?

Is it a poem because of the hours I spent to find just the right word
to craft just the right sentence
to show you how the green gold of the hummingbird’s chest
was the exact color of my great grandmother’s brooch?

Or is it a poem
just because
I say
it is a poem?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Today has been more pondering about my struggle to write or struggling to not write or struggling to not care what other people think about what I want to write. Just some rough haiku as I try to move through the muddled part of my brain.

falling on deaf ears
my words, pulled from my soul, yes,
my heart breaks again

my heart breaks again
stories stagnate within me
this is what I fear

this is what I fear
doubt wins too many battles
words unwritten wait

words unwritten wait
happily ever after
more than just a dream

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

I found that last year, writing the poems about the father I never knew took a tremendous amount of energy, creative and emotional, energy from me. It was draining. It was inspiring. And at the end, it was healing. I am a talker who never really gets to talk enough. So this pondering out loud is my way of talking and trying to use up all that energy until I don’t need it for this anymore and I can move on to something else.

Poem a Day #9

I read once that if you have a hole in your story
you should point to it, over and over again,
the idea being that if you pointed enough times,
it would disappear and cease to be a hole.

So when people ask me why it is I can’t seem
to quit talking about things or move on past things,
at the speed they think I should be moving on,
well, I just tell them I’m pointing to the hole,
hoping it will fill itself up by the time I’m done talking

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

This poem is late to the table because there is some serious thinking going on in my brain. I’m looking for the off switch. Time to stop thinking quite so much.

Poem a Day #10

I’ve read just about every kind
of "how to do it" book you can read
when it comes to writing,
even if I can’t remember who said what.

I think I’ve absorbed a lot over the years.

How to write mostly boils down to
write what you know or write
what you want to know,
just pick one and get to work.

The how to write isn’t as hard as
the making yourself sit down and do it.
The world will keep on spinning
even if you never write another word.
Really.

You really just need one thing to write,
you need to want it bad.

It’s the wanting that makes it so.
It’s the wanting that makes it real.
It’s the wanting that fuels the doing.

What I forget is that wanting isn’t a thinking thing,
it’s a heart thing.
Wanting to write isn’t based on any logic,
it is born from the need to connect,
one writer, one story, one word
a bridge,
from heart to heart.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

I am learning to be comfortable in my silence which in turn, is helping me understand how much I have to say that is worth saying.

Poem a Day #11

Sometimes,
on those days when the voices in my head
are louder than the voices on the page,
silence scares me.

Sometimes,
when I listen not only to the space between the words
but to space that echoes from words left unspoken,
silence understands me.

Sometimes,
when I remember that saying nothing at all
can be as powerful as shouting at the top of your voice,
silence comforts me.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Today I was remembering a rubber band experiment about resistance. The idea behind it was that if two people are both pulling on a rubber band and neither one gives in, the rubber band is going to break and someone is going to get hurt. But if you move toward the resistance, give into it, the resistance goes away.

A friend asked me if perhaps the reason I was fighting so much with myself was that I was due for a change….that perhaps my writing would take place alongside (instead?) of something else. I had no answer for her question but it did give me something juicy to think about. What if I gave in to my resistance? What would happen then?

Poem a Day #12

I can’t help but wonder
if maybe this path I’m on,
this path I’ve walked for so many years,
is not the path I’m meant to walk forever

It’s not like I know where to turn
or what else to do
or even if I want to but still
I can’t help but wonder

what would I become
and would I even recognize myself
walking toward me on another path?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

The concept of being here in the moment is easy to grasp. It’s the action that keeps tripping me up. But I keep trying because I think the trying is where a lot of the learning is going on.

Poem a Day #13

Be here now
seems like such a little thing to do,
and yet a thousand times a day
my mind falls backward, like a car on a hill
when you forget to set brake,
and worries from the past
charge up to meet me.

Other times that crazy mind of mine
races forward, like a runaway horse,
for uncharted but always scary territory.

I think I’m finally
(okay, just beginning)
to understand that
be here now
is not a destination like a finished painting
or the completion of a manuscript,
it’s a never-ending  journey
away from
back to
face-to-face with
not who I was
not who I am meant to be
but who I am
here
right now.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

In the weekly poetic reading/exercises that I am doing with  I find that some weeks are easier than others. This week’s was one of the toughest for me and yet, once I made myself do it, I learned a lot. You can check out the post that started it all here 

People say that if there is no joy in the writing you should just stop writing. Yesterday, today, there was much joy and I am grateful.

Poem a Day #14

Yesterday I challenged myself to call up
an old poem and listen carefully
to the sounds of the story
it spilled upon the page.

Unable to imagine success, I resisted,
like a child unwilling to take a nap.
The task was hard and made my brain hurt
in places that felt unused.

I forced myself
if only to keep from being embarrassed
when I had nothing to show
for the day.

Surprise tapped me on the shoulder
and I was face-to-face
with my old friend joy,
the one that comes with word play.

My pulse raced, just a little,
and though it was time to break for dinner
I found I couldn’t stop
I didn’t want to stop
I had to write just one more word.

I couldn’t hold the high for long,
just long enough
to create a crack, in the concrete,
of my storyteller’s soul.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

I am horrible about falling into the "compare" trap when talking about progress on a project. If I’ve written 100 words, someone else has done 500. If I manage 1,000, someone else has done a chapter. It’s discouraging to me so I find that I have to pull away from reading a lot of what my friends are doing. This is even worse when I am working in verse because word counts and chapter counts, well, they don’t count up the same. So I am trying to celebrate a poem a day. More is good. More is great. But more doesn’t always happen and that’s okay.

Poem a Day #15

one well-written poem
(no chapters, word or page counts)
a productive day

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Allergies slowed me down yesterday so I didn’t get this posted.

Poem a Day #16

I find it hard to take things
on faith alone.
I want proof that slowing down
being in the moment
is worth the investment of my time.

Today I follow the dog
down the garden path that ends
near the glider
where she sniffs the sage.

One ceanothus, still in bloom,
calls dozens and dozens of
bees to dance between
the blue blossoms.

Fat bumblebees
fuzzy carpenter bees
industrious honey bees
and bees that look like flies.

I stand still
let bees buzz all around me
and listen to the concert
I almost missed.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Behind again. A haiku from yesterday.

monkey flower blooms
beside the unfurling fern
can you hear me laugh?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

If you haven’t already seen Brené Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability, you need to go watch it now. Really. After watching it you might want to order one of her books. I highly recommend both of them but my favorite is The Gifts of Imperfection. So much of the creative world I live in is centered around feedback from others – is my work good enough to publish, to exhibit? Will I get reviewed and if so, will the review be any good? I admire those creatives who are able to say screw the rest of the world, I’m creating what I want to create. I can do it sometimes but not always.

But after reading Brené’s books I realize there are more ways to seek that approval than just with publishing. It’s all around me and I’ve become hyper-aware of it, maybe too aware of it, because I find myself hestitating to do things, to say things, because I don’t know if it will be perceived as trying to call attention to myself. As with everything else, I suppose it is a balancing act and I will have to go too far the other direction and then pull myself back to the center.

Chasing worthiness
want to quit that full-time job
my ego screams NO

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of learning what you need to know but understanding that you just need to be who you already are.

Poem a Day #19

There was a girl
who didn’t know a lot of things
but she knew how to feel
big feelings
and how to let the ink
spill across the page
showing the world how much
she didn’t know
and in the spilling
of ink her wisdom
grew.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

Looking for directions to get out of my own way.

Poem a Day #20

I think too much.

Instead of
letting words spill
across the page
letting words fall
out of order
letting words run
their own races
I think too much
and the ink
in my brain pen
dries up.

I want to channel my inner
Annie Lamott
and write those
crappy first drafts,
the kind where you can mix your tenses like a tossed salad
and place those damn modifiers anywhere you want
but I think too much
and my fingers freeze
like an old woman with arthritis
and the trapped words
grow like barnacles beneath my skin.

I wonder
if I am trying to protect myself
from the world
or maybe it is the world
that needs protecting
from all I might say
if only I wouldn’t think
so damn much.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved.